Gore Vidal Predicts U.S. Military Dictatorship

Author and liberal political pundit Gore Vidal declares that the U.S. is headed for a "military dictatorship" because "nobody else can hold everything together."

In a wide-ranging interview with the Times of London, the 83-year-old writer also commented on President Obama, George W. Bush, John McCain, even Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh – and likened Republicans to "Hitler Youth."

Vidal, a fierce critic of President Bush, supported Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, but now believes Hillary Clinton would have been a better president.

Asked how Obama is doing, he said:

"Dreadfully. I was hopeful...But he's inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He's acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman — solve that and you solve terrorism."

Vidal said Obama messed up — he actually used an expletive — on healthcare reform. "I don't know how because the country wanted it. We'll never see it happen."

Obama, he also said, "believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred...They're fascists."

Vidal didn't spew his vitriol only on the right. The country at large, he asserted, has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.

"Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realize how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is...

"Does anyone care what Americans think? They're the worse-educated people in the First World. They don't have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke."

Vidal called Sen. John McCain "the fool from Arizona" and a "liar," claiming that "we never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane and was held captive."

George W. Bush, he told The Times, won the White House in 2000 even though he was "the stupidest man in the country."

Mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, on the other hand, "was a true patriot, a Constitution man."

At one point during the interview, while discussing Obama and Abraham Lincoln, Vidal suddenly raised his fingers to signify a gun and muttered: "Bang bang."

The Times reported: "He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. 'Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,' he says in a wry, dreamy way."